Facebook removes 5.4 billion fake accounts

Facebook has removed as many as 5.4 billion fake accounts from the platform so far this year. The move was taken in a sign of a persistent battle on social media against manipulation and disinformation.

According to Facebook, it has improved its ability to detect fake and abusive accounts and blocked attempts to create such accounts. It has also pulled 11.4 million posts of hate speech and 11.6 million pieces of exploiting children were taken down in just the past three months.

We've made progress in important areas such as hate speech, child exploitation imagery, and posts about illegal drugs and firearm sales but we still have more to do. We'll continue to invest in people and systems to combat harmful content on our platforms.

— Meta (@Meta) November 13, 2019

"With these evolutions in our detection systems, ourproactive rate has climbed to 80%, from 68% in our last report, and we'veincreased the volume of content we find and remove for violating our hatespeech policy," said Guy Rosen, VP of Integrity for Facebook.